Appalachian Eulogy

by Robert Dugan

          I grunted while wrestling the heavy, dusty box wedged in crawl space of my apartment. I had outgrown the cramped place, and my teacher’s salary allowed me to purchase my first home. In preparation for the move, I divided my possessions neatly into two piles. One held the things I would take with me; the other I would donate to a local thrift store. The destiny of the current box was unknown as I dragged it from its lightless resting place. I pulled the box into the open air through a flurry of coughs and sneezes.

I opened the box, and a face stared up from a pile of crinkled photographs. The face was that of a young man who sat in a small plastic kiddie pool wearing torn Levi’s, an oversized belt buckle, and a camouflage ball cap. There was a scuffed, golden fishing hook bent around the bill. A cigarette dangled from his lip, and he held a beer in his hand. There was a pile of cash on the coffee table in front of him. He couldn’t have been older than eighteen or nineteen. I studied him for a moment, ashamed that it took me so long to remember a good friend.

A redneck from Roanoke, Chris drove a red Camaro with peeling and pock-marked clear coat. His southern drawl deepened toward incomprehensibility the more he drank; I loved the musicality in his speech and the way he spoke in southern aphorisms. We were part of an inseparable group of friends joined by our shared fondness for engines and alcohol.

          The night I took this picture eleven of us were jammed into Jake’s trailer back in the woods. Jake and I had been childhood friends. His father died of alcoholism and left him a house, fifty thousand dollars, and a social security check. He’d pissed it all away by the time he was seventeen.

It was a Friday, pay day. Jake added his wages from his job sweeping factory floors to the pile of cash on the table. I hunkered in the threadbare chair and listened to their planning. I’d begun to tire of their constant pill chasing.

“How much we got all together?” Jake asked.

“About eighteen hundred,” Chris replied.

“Make sure and save forty for pizza,” I added.

“Call Doddy and get him over here to make a sale,” Chris said.

“Already done. He said he’d be here in thirty.” Jake shuffled the cash together and removed two twenty-dollar bills. Varsity Blues played from a VCR connected to the flat screen. I took a sip of my whiskey and crushed my cigarette in the ashtray before lighting another. I’d never seen so much cash up close.

It would buy a lot of pills and many hours of oblivion.

We’d graduated from drinking and smoking in our parents’ basements. We used to raid their liquor cabinets and replace what we’d taken with water. We prayed they wouldn’t notice a missing pack from a carton of Camel Lights. Things were a lot different now.

I could hear someone crushing the last of the old pills on the kitchen counter behind me.

“When you gonna get in on this?” Jake asked.

He’d been pressuring me to join everyone else snorting pills.

“Leave him alone,” Chris said. “If he don’t want to, he don’t have to. He’s got good grades. Let him drink his Jack and smoke if that’s all he wants to do.” Chris was a couple years older than us and had more perspective. He worked for a mom and pop tiling outfit. He was skilled enough to work, but not certified, so he struggled to make a living wage. He hadn’t advanced since high school, unable to afford an education. I watched him work and spend, resigned to a wretched circular existence. He knew how life would change after high school. He knew enough to realize that whatever grand ambitions we held would devolve into Appalachian hopelessness. I appreciated that he took it on himself to defend my restraint to the others and wanted to believe that he admired my discipline, my ability to say “no,” that he respected my good grades and envied my stable home life.

Doddy’s headlights shone through the front window glass and obscured my view of the TV. He stumbled in through the front door, eyes glassy. “Hydros are eight, so are percs. Oxy is twelve a pill. How do you want it mixed?”

“Just give us a little of everything.” Jake handed over the money.

Doddy counted out the pills, and just like that, a week’s wages for a group of young men walked out the door.

Chris cut up the first pill from the newly acquired baggy on a ceramic tile that sat on the coffee table.

The pills, the pizza, and what was left of the money were gone by Sunday morning.

Pills were more expensive than heroin, but the guys rationalized their purchase through denial. Pills had none of the social stigma of heroin, which seemed the stereotypical drug for the hardcore addict. Heroin use represented an indictment, the acknowledgement that they had moved from occasional drug use to dependence. For a time, they paid more to be able to say that they did not do heroin. But eventually the price of denial became too high, heroin, too cheap. When they finally gave in, they snorted it for a time. Shooting it seemed a step too far.

When I started my first semester of college, little by little I parted ways with my friends. Once I was exposed to more people and greater ideas, I chose Saturday night study groups over weekend parties at the trailer. In time, I replaced my old drinking buddies with English professors and education majors.

I had been walking to my car after a class when an unfamiliar number rang my phone. It was Jake. All he said was, “Chris is dead. Overdose. Viewing is Friday. I hate to be so short man, but I got a lot of people to call.” Jake hung up without waiting for me to ask questions. I was shocked, and sorrow hit me hard.

They’d found Chris dead with a needle in the back of his arm among a pile of dirty laundry. Chris didn’t look real lying in the casket with his ball cap on. The fishing hook crimped around the bill reflected the glow of the overhead lights. I wondered if the morticians polished it when they did his makeup and stitched his lips closed.

“Chris loved cars and fishing.” The minister stated flatly as he looked down at his notecards. I resented the old man for giving the eulogy. The speech meant to immortalize him in our memories should’ve been given by the friends he had left behind. His grandmother had taken quick control of the funeral arrangements. She cut many of Chris’s friends out of ceremony in an effort to minimize attention to the way he died. The ceremony would be tightly controlled, the minister the only speaker. “It’s a difficult thing when the Lord takes such a young life. Chris was in the fullness of his vigor, but like all life, he was suffering. He’s gone home to be with Jesus now, to be clothed in the splendor of his glory, to walk without pain or torment for all eternity.” The irony of the minister’s words gave my grief a jagged edge. Chris was an atheist; of that I was certain. The minister’s words were for Chris’s grandparents, not for us.

When the preaching concluded, we stood and filed past the casket. After I said my goodbyes, I turned to leave, facing the family. I struggled to avoid eye contact with everyone gathered to mourn his passing as I made my way down the aisle. I was ashamed. I knew I played no part in his overdose, but I felt complicit in it.

I hadn’t seen the bulk of my old friends in years. I’d stopped coming around once I started college, once heroin entered the picture. At the time of Chris’s funeral, I was in the midst of student teaching and wrestled with a schedule that left little time for socializing or drunkenness, and I was worried that, despite my successful resistance thus far, I would find myself addicted to something far worse than Marlboros.     

We left the funeral hall and headed to the FoodLion parking lot to sit on tailgates and bench seats, a familiar and comforting ritual. I was the last to arrive, and I noticed that Chris’s usual spot was empty. I imagined the faded red Camaro sitting on the cracked asphalt between the barely perceptible white lines. I made a lap around the parking lot just like I used to and drove up to a warm greeting. I parked, got out, and lit a cigarette. One by one, I met the eyes of those around me, lingering on each person for just a moment.

We caught up and took stock of everything that had changed between us and within us. Our tight-knit group had splintered into several smaller ones, divided along the lines of what was considered acceptable substance abuse. But for that brief time, all of those divisions melted away. Tragedy brought us a fleeting togetherness we thought we’d lost. We picked up where we’d left off. We talked about the days before life became so complicated, before we’d experienced loss, and for those few precious hours we were together, unencumbered and honoring memories of Chris.

As we were starting our goodbyes, Jake grabbed a can of white spray paint from a truck bed tool box and sprayed Chris’s name in big, sloppy letters in his empty parking space. We all contemplated the awkwardly-drawn letters, and then one after the other we left the scene, the roar of muscle cars and lifted trucks underscoring our vandalism.  

Now, years later, I barely recognize that young man in those photos, with his smirk, the cigarette dangling from his lip. I struggle to recall the names of all of those young men I once held so dear, and I wonder if any of the others have died. I have grown so far away from them, and from that place we made for ourselves. I’ve traveled the country and expanded my worldview. I have my own family. I earned a Master’s degree in education. I run my own classroom and am regarded as an expert in my field. I now have kids of my own, one natural, but hundreds more who I work hard to guide as a teacher.

I still make my old lap around the Food Lion parking lot, though only after buying groceries. On Friday nights, teenagers still gather under the florescent lights. They sit in the same spot that we did a decade ago, smoking cigarettes and talking. The spray-painted memorial has been covered by fresh asphalt. As I pass them and they wave, excited to see their teacher outside of school, I survey the faces, and in some of them I see someone from my past, someone nearly forgotten.

Robert Dugan lives in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia with his wife and daughter. “Appalachian Eulogy” is his first publication. He teaches creative writing and secondary English. He hopes to teach his students to find strength in writing about their life experiences. He wants to thank Anne Larson for encouraging him to seek publication and his wife for her unwavering support.

In the Matter of My Law Degree

by Barb Howard

We are moving. Packing must begin. But, first, a weeding out of the things that should not be packed. The junk. I bravely start in our ersatz storage space—known as the crap closet. In the closet, along with ski boots that don’t fit anyone in our house, a loosely-strung badminton racket, a ball pump, and a clothes iron (so that’s where it was!), there are certificates of education of the type that one might hang on an office wall if one didn’t work primarily in one’s kitchen. Among them is my law degree. Roughly three times larger than the others—making it about the height of a beer fridge—the law degree stands out from the pack. There it is: ironic (given its relative size and how little law I practiced), non-reflective (figuratively, but also literally because I paid for non-reflective glass), and, frankly, with all its self-importance and Latin curlicue-ness, kind of goofy. I won’t go so far as to say the degree looks like a joke.

How many lawyers does it take to screw in a light bulb?

I practiced law in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. The tasks I was given as an articling student and junior associate kept me busy and in lawyer clothes (it was the no-shoulder-pad-is-too-big era). By setting up small companies, closing down small companies, and telling individuals why they should become small companies, I thought I was successfully doing what downtown people did. Company stuff! I had only worked in an office once in my life—at a summer job where my main responsibility was to write tiny words on tabs for file folders and which I quit spur-of-the-moment when I got offered a job as a canoeing instructor. In any event, at the law firm I didn’t trouble myself with the larger picture of what I was accomplishing or about how much law I was actually practicing. I was twenty-five years old and making money. In one performance review I was told that I smiled a lot. Too late, I realized that was a tip-off, a hint that I wasn’t going to be smiling for much longer.

The managing partner, the guy with the manicured hands and perpetual ski tan, soon invited me to his office to tell me, essentially, to take my smiling face, my shoulder pads, and briefcase, home for good. He said I seemed nice but that I never seemed to “get it” (“it” being the practice of a law, I guess) and suggested another profession, really any other profession, might be a better fit for me. He said, recalling the recent firm ski trip, that he hoped that we would cross paths on the slopes sometime. On my walk home I imagined how we might cross paths on the ski hill and the managing partner did not fare well in any of the scenarios.

“Let go” was the euphemism for firing in those days—the odd implication being that there was new-found freedom involved, that it was a fine thing to be let go from your salary. If I was smiling when I got let go, it was just out of bad habit. Mostly I was wishing I had been plain fired, not let go. Being fired sounded like chutzpah and moral outrage were involved. Like I stood up for something. (Smiling?)

Hey, I don’t know how many lawyers it takes to screw in a light bulb. I didn’t practice long enough. But I do know they should all go about it very very seriously. No smiling. And I also know that skiing skills won’t necessarily keep them on the lightbulb team.

What do you call ten law students buried up to their necks in sand?

I arrived at my legal training through an indirect path. I liked the outdoors and so, after high school, I enrolled in the faculty of Forestry at a west coast university. To the eighteen-year-old me, that was a logical move. (I didn’t learn about logic until law school, and I didn’t pretend to be logical until I had children.) My parents seemed doubtful. My dad started referring to me as Smokey the Bear. He was a lawyer, which at first glance may seem highly significant to me and my law degree. And I suppose that it was. However, and I know this will be unbelievable to anyone who, unlike me, grew up in a “tell us about your day” type of family, I had no idea what being a lawyer meant or what my dad did at work. He never talked about it other than to refer to it generically as “the office” or “work.” As in, “I’m going to the office” or “some of us have to work.” Certainly, because my dad was a lawyer, I knew that there were such things as lawyers. But I’d like to think I could have figured that much out myself.

My mother, a woman of quiet wit and uber calm, and with the power to crush any ill-conceived dream with a single practical observation, suggested I shouldn’t feel pressured to go to university just because my older siblings were degree holders. She said there were other options for people like me. Like me? You know, she said, outdoorsy types. Sporty types. I should have given her words more thought but, at the time, with my teenage chip on one shoulder and my teenage ego on the other shoulder, it felt like she was calling me that old cliché—the dumb jock. Come to think of it, she probably was calling me that.

So, of course, being eighteen, I ignored everyone’s input and forged ahead with my Forestry plan and, of course, soon discovered that hiking in the woods was not the same thing as identifying the woods, understanding the woods or, for that matter, cutting down the woods. This was long enough ago that, even though the course content no longer reflected it, the hearty refrain to my faculty song was "cut, burn, and pave!" I learned a few things about nurse logs, cork boots, and waterproof pencils. Still, there was a problem. I liked the words dendrology and silviculture more than I liked studying dendrology and silviculture. While I was in Forestry, I was also taking English courses. In Forestry, we could only read good books in our spare time, whereas in English we read good books as part of our course work. And, full disclosure, I got better marks in English.

One night, at a gathering of the woodchoppers at the university pub, I confessed to a Forestry prof that I was thinking of switching to the faculty of English. He said, do it. Then he bought me a beer by way of celebration. I never was sure if we were celebrating me or celebrating the fact that Forestry would be rid (let go!) of me. (In fact, they weren’t rid of me—for years I stayed on their intramural teams and hung around their parties like an invasive species.)

So I finished in English. And then, like thousands of uncreative Arts students before and after me, saw no way to make a living other than by attending that privileged temporary haven from the working world: law school. Long story short: I did not distinguish myself in law school (except perhaps that one night on the broomball rink) but I did graduate and obtain the large certificate that ended up in my crap closet.

What would I call ten law students buried up to their necks in sand? Drunk. Once your gut is full of beer and law student comradery, burying yourself in sand might seem like a grand idea. A funny photo op. I came home from my first year of law school so bloated with boozing that I looked like a puffer fish. In my graduation photo, two years later, there is no visible improvement. Maybe a better question would be to ask how many law students of that era became full blown alcoholics during or after law school. That’s a stat that should be kept. Still, from what little I remember, it was super fun. I was probably smiling the whole time.

How do you save a drowning lawyer?

I articled and practiced briefly at the aforementioned firm, and then, after being let go by said firm, I got a job at a big-ass oil company. What let-go Calgary lawyer from my era didn’t work at an oil company? Oil companies were welcoming and, in those days, didn’t seem to expect too much from workers at my level. No nights or weekends, every third Friday off, and a helluva Stampede party. At the oil company it seemed no one ever missed lunch. Lunch was important. I spent mine on a bench in the Devonian Gardens—writing stories. I wrote fiction. But, sure, a few law colleagues, barely disguised, might have ended up on the page. Some as heroes and heroines, some as ski-tanned nutbars. The oil patch job wasn’t exactly drowning me, but the writing certainly buoyed me. More writing, I decided, would be a good thing.

I left the oil company for a legal writing job that I could do mostly from home. I wrote case summaries at a publishing company that was a de facto holding pen for pregnant lawyers, female lawyers with preschool children, and female lawyers who did not “get” the profession. I fit all those categories. Although lawyers are typically portrayed as being long winded, the women in the holding pen were efficient with words. They didn’t have time to fuss around. They knew their shit. They didn’t take shit. That was impressive. However, in the world beyond the holding pen, the job was seen as lower grade. Women’s work. Once tainted with a case summaries job, it was a rare lawyer who could claw their way back to private practice.

When I worked for the legal publisher, I did my summaries at home and, once a week, I put on some shoulder pads (smaller ones than I wore in the ‘80s) and drove a floppy, yet succinct, disk of my words to the downtown office. Email was newfangled and considered too risky a conduit for this type of groundbreaking information. While working from home, with no overlord to keep track of how I was using my time, I began writing fiction during the daylight time when my kids were at daycare--which is when I was, in theory, supposed to be writing the case summaries. I also began a lifelong practice of rationalizing my outdoor activity time as the same as working out in a downtown gym over lunch. This all led to a panicked writing of the case summaries in the middle of the night when my kids were asleep. I learned this skill of burning the candle at both ends at law school, and am thankful to have it. Others might call it time mismanagement.

I quit the legal summaries job, my last law-ish job, when the publishing company decided they wanted everyone to work in the office. That would have thrown a wrench into my fiction-by-day, law-by-night, outdoor-activity-whenever-I-felt-like-it system. I began calling myself a writer even though most people rolled their eyes. Twenty years ago I wrote a contest-winning story (loosely linking a beekeeper and a kid I threw up with in elementary school after we binged on powdered Kool-Aid) in Canadian Lawyer and established—at least to the five or six people who read it—that I did indeed do some writing. I was no John Grisham. No William Deverell, although their names were, and are still, mentioned to me at every turn. In any event, with that resounding one-story success and an unhinged optimistic view of how fast my literary star would rise (still waiting on that …), I settled into my writing life.

How do you save a drowning lawyer? One answer might be: send her to a legal publisher where, outside of the traditional legal pools, she is able to envision writing as a career. Throw her a life ring and let her kick to a different shore.

A lawyer, a writer, and a marriage commissioner walk into a bar.

Over the decades I’ve gone through various phases in my relationship with my lawyer-past. My bios, supplied for stories and books and events and in courses I teach, illustrate a shaky progression. When I first declared myself as a writer I didn’t have any publications and so I used my lawyer-past to flesh out an otherwise empty bio. I felt it said, hey, give me time, I was busy before this run at writing. And, I was proud I had made it through law school, albeit without flying colours. I only practiced for a few years but I did have that oversized degree as tangible proof that I graduated. Then, about fifteen years ago, after a few publications and around the time I was working on an MA in Creative Writing, I entered a phase of embarrassment that I ever was a lawyer. I met a few established writers who told me they could have gone to law school but they didn’t because they knew it would suck out their souls. One writer told me she went to law school for one year and then dropped out because it was conformist and restricting. They all indicated they were SO not lawyer material, and I understood it, as I believe it was intended, to mean that lawyer material was a bad thing. I took “lawyer” out of my bio and entered a period of pretending that I had no educational or working past, that I emerged fully-formed from a creative writing petri dish. I did a fine job of deleting from my bio not just the lawyer aspects but all the traditional and comfortable trappings in my life, including my husband, my kids, my proclivity for (and free time for) outdoor activities. I assumed “lawyer,” and all my other life accoutrements, made me look too mainstream and shoulder-padded to possess any creative abilities.

More recently, I have re-introduced “former lawyer” into my bios, in part because I have been digging around in my lawyer past, and in law in general, and I am exploring the interface between law and writing. Many individuals participate in both professions. In the creative writing classes I teach there is usually at least one lawyer enrolled. One obvious overlap is that lawyers and writers draft, edit and nitpick over written words. In my experience, both lawyers and writers tend to read widely beyond their job requirements. Of more interest to me, though, is the way both professions are based on narrative. In law, the story—the “what happened” or the “what if this happened”—underlies everything. The five w’s (who, what, where, when, why) of storytelling could form an outline for any lawyer interviewing a client, building a case, or drafting a contract.

Lawyers and writers are trained to look at scenarios from every angle. Writers call those angles Points of View and while they might only choose one or two through which to tell a story, an experienced writer will consider all the Points of View, the mindset of all the main characters, in order to create a rounded text. Similarly, a lawyer must study a legal situation from the perspective of all the stakeholders, or characters, in order to not leave holes in a contract or court case.  

In a civil suit, the parties are usually called the plaintiff and the defendant. In Canadian criminal cases, the parties are usually called the accused and the Crown. In contractual documents, the sides are often called the something-or and the something-ee. In writing, similarly, the parties to the story are often called protagonists and antagonists. In real-life law and in most good writing, the sides are rarely as clear and dichotomous as the models suggest. Perhaps someone is withholding information, perhaps someone’s backstory makes unreasonable actions seem more reasonable, perhaps a third party, a secondary character, arises and throws a wrench into the expected narrative. It’s the grey areas that make both law and literature interesting. Arguably, it’s the grey areas that make literature, well, literature.

 

There are also commonalities in the nature of the relationship between lawyers/writers and their clients/readers. That is, the very relationships that are the source of their incomes. Just as there is a contract between a lawyer and her client, there is an implied contract between an author and her reader. A client expects a lawyer to handle their narrative situation. A contract is formed when the client pays the consideration of a retainer or fee. Similarly, be it fiction or nonfiction, a reader expects the author to handle and deliver a story. Arguably, a contract is formed when the reader buys a book. Arguably, a contract is formed when any reader, not just the book purchaser, opens a book and puts their trust in the author to spin a story. If you open my book and fall asleep after two pages, I probably have not upheld my writer-end of the contract. I haven’t delivered the goods.

And, finally, lawyers and writers provide checks and balances on each other. Through stories, writers remind lawyers that they could be as upstanding as Harper Lee’s Atticus Finch (“upstanding” in the way he is generally viewed to be in To Kill a Mockingbird as opposed to recent deconstructions and his portrayal in Go Set a Watchman) or as vile as Charles Dickens’ Mr. Vholes (the name says it all). Writers create works that warn lawyers that if they don’t take care of the institution of law they could produce folly or unfairness or worse. The term kafka-esque would not have arisen without a writer (and, as it happens, an insurance lawyer) named Franz Kafka.Lawyers provide assistance and legal balance for writers. Most writers can’t afford a lawyer but, when a situation goes really bad, who you gonna call? Maybe a publisher or a writing organization who calls a lawyer on your behalf? Maybe a friend of friend of a guy who used to date your neighbor is a lawyer who feels the need to address copyright breaches, disappearing publishers, libel suits, and the Will your famous writer-spouse forgot to draw up? When they are available and affordable, lawyers can be useful. And at the highest level of the law, the union between lawyers and writers is forever sealed because lawyers are integral to maintaining that key Charter right for writers: freedom of expression.

What's the difference between a dead skunk and a lapsed lawyer?

Perhaps I’m dreaming, but I’d like to think that there are many differences between a dead skunk and a lapsed lawyer. At the very least, there seem to be some obvious physical differences like, say, the number of legs.

A similarity between the dead skunk and this lapsed lawyer is that neither of us can practice law. I had one short phase of thinking I might re-write the Bar exams and re-enter the legal world. But, like the skunk, that phase died. The process would cost too much money, take too much time, and I had too little interest. It galls me to say it, but maybe that managing partner who said I didn’t “get it” was right.

Back to the crap closet and my law degree. I decide to keep the iron, thinking I will try a few sessions with it but feeling pretty sure that I don’t own enough iron-able clothes to make it a serious pastime. I fill a garbage bag with fossilized runners, hazy swim goggles, and all the other items that will never be used or re-used by anyone, and I drive to the local dump. Among the things I toss in? My law degree. I never missed it when it was in the closet and it’s just too big for where I’m headed. I don’t know if I “get” what I am doing now, or if I am better at it than I would have been as a lawyer, but I do know that I am enjoying the direction. I have no regrets about getting that degree and no regrets about dumping the physical representation of it.

A few more differences between a dead skunk and this lapsed lawyer? Okay, one of them is alive. And that one is still smiling, not at the dead skunk or at a joke, but at how things have a way of working out over time.

Barb Howard is the author of the short story collection Western Taxidermy which was a finalist at the High Plains Book Awards and a winner of the Canadian Authors Association Exporting Alberta Award. She has won the Howard O'Hagan Award for short story, published three novels, and is currently writing, at a snail’s pace, a book about law and literature. Barb lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. www.barbhoward.ca

Why I Love Coffee

by Jesse Millner

I didn’t start drinking coffee until I was in my early thirties. I’d get up in the morning and brew in an old steel pot, then pour it into a “Virginia Is For Lovers” cup with a bright, red heart on it. The final touch was a shot of Jim Beam, which helped ease the caffeine jitters. After a couple cups of java, I’d be a wide-awake drunk.

There was something really beautiful about those drunken mornings. I lived in Chicago and on those cold winter dawns when everything smoked, when the sky was dark blue and frigid, during those hours the weather outside matched the desolation I felt inside in those frozen fields of my body.  I’d sit by a living room window and sip my coffee as my wife slept and an occasional car slipped down Addison Street. I loved the taste of the Maxwell House and bourbon, the bitter burning brew.

By the winter of 1986, the drunken mornings had stretched out for years and the shot of Jim Beam flavoring my coffee had become two shots, but the extra bourbon could not stop my hands from shaking, could not stop my first wife from leaving, could not keep me from losing my job.

In March of 1986, I was admitted to Chicago’s Alcoholic Treatment Center, a free program located in an old hospital building next to the Cook County Jail. I shared a cubicle with five other men. I had the cot closest to the north window that overlooked a wall with barbed wire at the top and intermittent guard towers.

The worst thing about treatment was the coffee: it was bourbon-less, for one thing. And worse, they only served decaf in the treatment center cafeteria. I’d sit around with the other lost souls, drinking the bad coffee, talking about the mess we’d made of our lives. One man had shot someone in a drug deal gone bad and had just been released from prison. Another was a Guatemalan man whose union-organizer brother had been killed and who’d believed he would be next. He’d fled to Chicago to escape the murderers but hadn’t been able to leave his craving for booze behind. We sat up all night around green, Formica tables drinking decaf. We told our tales of disappointment and despair. And drank more coffee.

After two weeks in treatment, we were allowed our first visit to the outside world. We were taken in vans to a Saturday morning AA meeting on Milwaukee Avenue. It was held in a big room over a dance studio where aspiring Polka dancers from the surrounding Polish neighborhood perfected their art. It was a breakfast meeting and there was a big buffet offering eggs and bacon, pancakes and the like. But best of all, there was real coffee. I ate a huge breakfast and drank three cups of coffee. I listened to people talk about their struggles with booze and their happiness about being sober. There was also a raffle at the end where several lucky winners won free passes to an upcoming AA dance.

After not having real coffee for two weeks, the effect of the caffeine was miraculous. I felt clear and happy. But my hands shook the whole ride home.

The early days of my sobriety were defined by coffee. Every AA meeting I went to had coffee. It usually tasted pretty awful because it was made by volunteers who were new to sobriety. To this day when I smell a cup of coffee brewing, I think of AA.

Twenty years later, I drink coffee every morning. Good, expensive coffee. Usually organic. My second wife, who’s only known me sober, sits at her computer in the next room, sipping a black coffee.

We met because of coffee. When we were both in graduate school in Florida, we attended a writer’s conference on the Panhandle, and my future wife was a graduate assistant who received free tuition in exchange for making coffee for the various workshops. The first morning of the conference, I encountered her in the kitchen of the house where my poetry class was to be held; she was looking quizzically at a bag of Starbucks and a coffee filter.

I asked her if she needed help.  She said, “Yes, I really do. I’ve never made coffee before.”

I looked at this beautiful woman whom I’d seen around school but never talked to and got really nervous, so I simply poured the coffee into the filter and added the water without measuring it. The coffee turned out really strong. The people in the poetry workshop complained. My future wife and I went out for coffee the next morning at a nearby restaurant that overlooked the Gulf of Mexico. It was one of those bright Florida mornings when anything seems possible. We drank coffee and laughed at the “Sunshine State” placemats which showed Disney and mermaids and oranges. A year later at the same writer’s conference we got married. 

Now I’m remembering the name of the restaurant: The Wheelhouse. And I’m even remembering our waitress’ name, Frankie Day. She was having husband trouble—her man was an alcoholic who’d disappear for days at a time, then check in from some small town in Alabama, or Georgia, or somewhere else within the Bible Belt. He’d be broke and hung-over, asking for money to get home with. Wiring money, like ending a sentence on a preposition, is a risky business, and Frankie was fed up with the dude, and I told her I didn’t blame her.

My wife had pancakes. She always had pancakes for breakfast. I had pigs in a blanket with a side of hash browns. The coffee was lousy but I enjoyed it anyway. I’d been sober for about a decade and I wanted to tell Frankie that there’s always hope. I didn’t. Instead I flirted with Lyn, and we laughed about the bad smell in the joint. We came to call it “The Cat Piss Restaurant,” instead of The Wheelhouse.

All these years later, I still love coffee. It wakes me up, helps clear away those very tangible cobwebs that linger from sleep. I see a horse running across a Kentucky pasture; I see my first wife crying when they turned off our electricity; I see drunken winters in Chicago, so cold the earth and sky turned blue; I see again the treatment center and taste the decaf; I remember those first sober days when I ran along the lake; I see Florida; I see my second wife, Lyn; and I see the stain and drip of years of coffee on my desk this morning, a sort of tattoo that reminds me of where I’ve been, where I’ve dreamed, and the meanings I’ve made of both.

Jesse Millner’s poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in the Florida Review, upstreet, Conte, River Styx, Pearl, The Prose Poem Project, Tinge, The New Poet, Cider Press Review, Real South, The Best American Poetry 2013 and numerous other literary magazines. He has published six poetry chapbooks and two full-length collections, most recently Dispatches from the Department of Supernatural Explanation (Kitsune Books, 2012). Jesse teaches writing courses at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers.